Several States in Germany Reject Electoral Lists of Neo-nazis

In the September 6 elections for the Bundestag, the Lower House of the West German Parliament, eleven parties will appear on the ballot. Seven of them are listed on the ballots of all nine states which compose West Germany.

Several of the states have rejected the electoral lists of the openly neo-Nazi parties for such technical reasons as an insufficient number of signatures by legal residents on the nominating petitions. Nonetheless, the neo-Nazi Nationalist Rally will appear on the ballot in Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein, while the German Reich Party will appear on six state ballots. Recently two top candidates of the German Reich Party, former Goebbels aide Werner Naumann and Hans Ulrich Rudel, were struck off the ballots by government action.

While the Nationalist Rally and German Reich Party are unabashedly pro-Nazi, individual ex-Nazis appear on many other party tickets. For instance, in the Lower Saxony constituency where Naumann was running, the candidate of the Free Democratic Party is a former Nazi peasant leader and a onetime high-ranking officer of the Social Reich Party, which was outlawed last year because of its openly Nazi character.

The B.H.D. Refugee Party, German Party, Bavarian Party, Free Democratic Party, Neutralist All-German People’s Party and the Christian Democratic Union, in that order, are the worst offenders in seeking to capture the neo-Nazi vote by naming Nazi candidates. However, no party is entirely free of this tendency.